Razzennest is what happens when someone stares at a Blu-ray menu, hears “Now with audio commentary by the director,” and thinks, this should be a horror movie. Johannes Grenzfurthner takes one of cinema’s sleepiest traditions—the pretentious commentary track—and turns it into a supernatural meltdown, a satire of art-house ego, and a genuinely unnerving piece of horror. It’s like if a film festival Q&A got possessed by the mass graves of European history.
On paper, the premise sounds almost too niche: South African director and self-anointed genius Manus Oosthuizen meets up with critic Babette Cruickshank in a Los Angeles sound studio to record an audio commentary for his new “elegiac feature documentary,” also called Razzennest, about the legacy of the Thirty Years’ War. Some members of the crew join in. They banter, posture, and perform their own brilliance into the microphones. And then, very slowly, the dead decide they’ve heard enough.
As the session continues, strange things start happening. The people in the booth become possessed by the ghosts of peasants and soldiers from 1645. Voices shift. Personalities warp. The smug chatter about aesthetics gives way to screams, arguments, and confessions that are definitely not part of the press kit. The commentary track turns into a séance, and history doesn’t just repeat—it interrupts, loudly.
The satire in Razzennest is pitch-black and very specific, in the best way. Manus is the kind of director who calls his own documentary “elegiac” and compares himself to great masters without blinking. Michael Smulik plays him as a walking stack of festival badges and unresolved issues: vain, defensive, and utterly convinced his work is the only appropriate way to contemplate human suffering. Babette, played by Sophie Kathleen Kozeluh, is equally recognizable: a clever critic fluent in buzzwords, always ready with a term like “liminal,” “post-traumatic landscape,” or “formally audacious.” Together they represent a whole ecosystem of cultural gatekeepers whose job is to talk about pain—without ever actually feeling it.
The movie has a lot of fun dismantling that ecosystem. At first, the commentary is exactly what you’d expect: flimsy anecdotes, overblown self-mythologizing, and arguments over who really understood the film. You can practically smell the festival bar snacks. Then the possession starts, and all that refined discourse gets steamrolled by raw, bewildered voices from the past.
That’s where the film turns from clever gimmick into something genuinely haunting. These aren’t generic “evil spirits” or stock demons. They’re the dead: peasants, soldiers, victims of a war most of the living barely remember beyond a page in a textbook. They’re angry, confused, and very unimpressed with how their suffering has been repackaged as atmospheric B-roll. One moment you’re listening to Manus explain his influences; the next, the same mouth is voicing a terrified villager, reliving a massacre.
The formal trick here is that you rarely leave the “finished” documentary images, but horror is happening entirely in the soundtrack. The landscapes of central Europe—fields, ruins, forests—play quietly on screen while the studio recording melts down in your ears. That disconnect is where the movie’s dark power lives. It’s like your headphones are haunted.
Sound design is the real star. Razzennest treats audio like a weapon: layered voices, distant battle sounds, the crack of musket fire, the rustle of bodies moving through darkness. The present-day chatter overlaps with these intrusions in ways that get increasingly disorienting. At some point, you stop being sure whether a sound belongs to the “documentary,” the sound booth, or something that has bled in from somewhere else entirely. It’s less a movie you watch and more one that crawls into your ears and rearranges the furniture.
Underneath all the stylistic play, there’s a very pointed sense of anger. The film is openly hostile toward the idea of turning atrocity into tasteful content. Manus wants his film to be seen as Serious Art about Serious History, but he’s still standing on the bones of real people for aesthetic effect. The ghosts’ invasion of the commentary feels like a cosmic correction: if you’re going to profit, intellectually or financially, from mass suffering, then those people get a say.
The dark humor comes from watching these very modern, very self-conscious film people try to maintain control while everything collapses. Manus treats possession like a hostile interview question—something he can talk his way around if he just sounds clever enough. Babette keeps reflexively analyzing even as the situation becomes impossible, because that’s what she’s built to do: interpret, contextualize, keep a safe critical distance. The crew, meanwhile, are stuck in the world’s worst workplace hazard, realizing that on top of low pay and long hours, they also have to worry about sudden historical reenactment via body snatching.
The cast sells every beat. Smulik is hilariously insufferable as Manus but never turns him into a cartoon; underneath the ego, there’s a scared, insecure little man who genuinely doesn’t know what to do when his authority dissolves. Kozeluh gives Babette a mix of warmth and sharpness—she’s not just a punching bag, she’s complicit in the system even as she struggles to keep up. The supporting players, drifting in and out of possession, get to deliver some of the most striking moments, toggling between their present-day personas and the tormented ghosts riding them like broken radios.
Adding to the meta fun, horror legend Joe Dante appears as the narrator, a kind of genre guardian angel shepherding us through this chaos. It’s a sly wink: the guy who gave us anarchic creature features now presides over a horror movie about the creatures behind the camera.
Despite its heavy themes and experimental structure, Razzennest is remarkably entertaining. It’s brisk, nasty, and full of bite. You don’t need a degree in film theory or a working knowledge of the Thirty Years’ War to enjoy it. You just need to appreciate movies that are willing to swing hard at their own medium. If you’ve ever listened to a commentary track and thought, “These people should not be left alone with microphones,” this is your movie.
What makes it a “good” horror film, beyond the cleverness, is that it actually leaves a mark. Once the credits roll, you’re left thinking about how often we turn real violence into content—news segments, documentaries, prestige dramas—and how easy it is to forget that behind every “haunting” historical image was a person who did not sign a release form for your catharsis.
In the end, Razzennest plays like a revenge story—not of one ghost, but of history itself, fed up with being pretty scenery in other people’s monologues. It’s sharp, funny in a sour way, and unsettling in all the right places. And it might just ruin director’s commentaries for you forever, which, frankly, is its own kind of public service.
